


What Was Simple In The Moonlight By The Morning Never Is

by axolotlnerd-campcamp (axolotlNerd)



Series: We Messed It Up Pretty Good This Time [1]
Category: Camp Camp (Web Series)
Genre: Also I wrote this literally months ago and just finished it recently thats why im posting it now, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, F/M, Gen, Here have some light makki and lots of teen angst, Rated for cursing, Teen Angst, This was basically a vent fic for me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 21:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14505624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axolotlNerd/pseuds/axolotlnerd-campcamp
Summary: It's a cold night, and Max has had something on his mind for a long time. Nikki is determined to help him with whatever is making him so distressed.





	What Was Simple In The Moonlight By The Morning Never Is

**Author's Note:**

> I personally headcanon Max as aro or aro-spec and Nikki to be a lesbian, so I didn't write this to be explicitly a relationship between Max and Nikki, but if you want to see it that way go right ahead! I mostly wrote this because I was feeling restless one night and wanted to go for a drive but I couldn't. Also, this was heavily inspired by Welcome To Night Vale, I finished reading it and I was so happy with the book that I wanted to write something like it.
> 
> Anyways, I hope you all like this little one-shot!

The winter wind was cold, biting at the edges of his skin as he walked out to his car. There were people yelling at him behind him, but he blocked it out. They were near strangers to him. He’d heard it all before, and what they were saying stopped mattering a long time ago.

 

Imagine a teenage boy. Just your run of the mill, average teenager. Gets good grades, gets in trouble more than most, but still tries his best regardless. Imagine him sitting in his car, a beater that leaks carbon monoxide into the vehicle so you have to keep the windows open or risk dying. Imagine that car. Imagine the rust on the edges of it’s metal, and imagine the way it bumps along the road, unsteady and unregulated. Imagine this teenage boy not caring about the fact his car is so run down.

You’re very good at this. Nicely done!

Now, imagine a friend of his. No, not that one, the other one. That’s her.

Now I want you to imagine a teenage girl, who’s absolutely not your run of the mill, average teenager. She doesn’t have great grades at all, plays hooky with her friends on test days, and more than anything wants to be an olympic athlete. Imagine her catching rides with friends because she doesn’t own a car. If she did own a car, imagine it would be black and probably a little old, a Jeep that didn’t have great mileage but was her’s and that’s what would matter. But it wasn’t her’s, so it doesn’t matter.

Here’s the hard part - imagine these two teenagers as the closest friends you could ever wish for. Imagine these two very different people in two very different situations living the same life. 

There’s a lot more I could tell you about these two people. I could tell you that the girl’s name is Nikki, and the boy’s name is Max. I could tell you that Nikki loves sports and is on the football and field hockey teams, and I could tell you that Max wouldn’t have given two shits about sports if he’d never befriended Nikki. I could tell you that Nikki might have ended up dropping out entirely had Max not been so determined to get her to graduate. I could tell you they had another friend named Neil, who is important to both of these teenagers but not important to this specific story. I could tell you so much more about these people.

But I won’t. That would simply be a waste of your time. 

That would simply be a waste of you.

Max drove in his car down the highway, not even looking at road signs as he sped away from his home. He had done everything except the thing wanted to do most, and that was get his parents words out of his head. 

He hated the nights like these - he just felt that he couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t make his shitty car go fast enough, he couldn’t get far enough away and he couldn’t forget the only things he really wanted to.

_ Useless. _

He wasn’t sure if this was an echo of the yelling he’d heard or a remark to himself. Maybe he knew that no matter how fast he drove, he’d never get the words out of his head. Maybe he didn’t. It didn’t matter very much. Not a lot mattered then.

Eventually, Max started to slow down. For a second, he panicked, thinking his car was breaking down. He breathed, then realized he was slowing down on purpose yet was not in tune with his body enough to notice. He let his car slow down to a normal highway speed, pretty fast but not as fast as the kid wished he could go.

He took the next exit, not caring where it would take him. The wind bit at his skin from his open window, and he wished he could close it. He didn’t think that he ever had, now that he thought about it. It would be best to keep it open anyways, considering the car’s condition.

It wasn’t long before Max finally pulled into the parking lot of some store in Rutland, Vermont. He hadn’t been here before, but it was too dark to see anything he might recognise regardless. He also did not know he was in Rutland, Vermont, and he didn’t know he had drove for a whole hour before reaching his final destination.

He shut off the car’s engine, not wanting to sit in the car as it generated it’s poison. The cold air surrounded him, no longer biting but simply letting him frost over as he began to explore the mysterious city.

Lights shone, but they flickered. It was quiet. The buildings were tall and loomed over the teenager as he listened to nothing but the sound of his own footsteps. It was quiet. He looked at a green sign, illuminated by the moonlight as it said “Welcome to downtown Rutland, Vermont”. It was quiet.

Max hated this quiet. Normal quiet was fine, as it didn’t make him feel so sad and alone, but this quiet was different. It made him feel so isolated, which he was always trying to convince himself he was not, even when he was. 

Something must have changed. Something must have made him think of something, because he took out his phone - a simple flip phone from the early 2000’s - and dialed his friend. The girl who loved sports, the girl who was his closest friend. He didn’t know why he was calling her, but he did it regardless.

There were many things Max did without knowing why. He didn’t know why he tried so hard in school, or why he swore so much. He didn’t know why he was friends with most of the people he had befriended, and he didn’t know why he had not befriended any of his teachers in his four years of high school. Often, he would let himself do these things, not thinking of why he was.

Nikki picked up on the first ring, cheery as ever. “Hey, Max! What’s up?” She asked brightly. At least he was sure he didn’t wake her up.

“Nothing. I was just wondering if you’d meet up with me? I’m in some town in Vermont, it’s…” He turned to look at the green sign again. “Rutland.” 

“Uh…” Nikki hummed as she tapped on something on the other end of the line, her computer probably. “You drove an hour away at eleven o’clock at night? In the middle of winter?”

“I might have sped a little bit. If you don’t want to drive out here, that’s fi-”

“No, I will! Mom’s asleep, so I’ll take her car.” Nikki said. Max simply hummed in response and let the quiet fall over them for a moment. Soft, white noise came from Nikki’s end as she shuffled around her room, quietly grabbing her winter coat. “Max,” She started, gentle. “Did something happen?”

The boy’s heart dropped, taken aback by the sudden question. Of course something had happened, something was always happening. Not just to Max or Nikki - and suddenly Max thought that maybe Rutland, Vermont wasn’t as quiet as it seemed. He swallowed and breathed.

“No. Yes. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Look, I’ll just-” He stopped himself, sighing for a moment before continuing. “Meet me in front of the country store?”

“Yeah. See you in an hour!” She said, bubbly once again.

Max listened to the dead air as she hung up, then put down his phone, staring at the screen before flicking it shut, letting the quiet reign once again.

 

The hour was short under the flickering and faded light of the town. Some local bar nearby was playing music, loud enough for Max to hear from the country store and keep him occupied.

Maybe Rutland could be a place he might live in the future. Quiet at nights, nothing but the faded noise of bars as they lay isolated from the rest of America. Vermont was a very lonely place when you stayed there too long. Maybe that’s what Max needed. Lots of space away from the world to think.

But as he thought, he started to think this place wasn’t as spacious as he needed. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep the space to himself. Everything that had happened - everything he’d tried so hard to ignore and block out and all of the memories he’d pushed to the side - was still with him in this lonely town and it took up all of the extra space.

The sound of a smooth motor rolled closer to him, and he looked up to see a silver car shining like the pale moon in the night. Nikki’s mother’s mini-van didn’t match the young girl at all, but since she got her license, it was the only thing she could take at night. The car was simply too out of character for her, so much so that Max almost didn’t recognise the girl as she shut off the engine and hopped out of the car.

Max didn’t say anything as she walked over to him, simply because he didn’t have anything to say that needed to be said. He had millions of things that he could say, but none of them were necessary. And yet, all of them were true.

Nikki sat down on the curb, feeling coldness of the cement underneath her seep in. She simply ignored it, favoring to look at her friend beside her. “Hey.” She said, feeling stupid in her simplicity.

But Max liked it. “Hey.” He replied with, just as simply. He ran a hand through his hair, grasping at the thick black curls out of nervousness. “Sorry to drag you out here in the cold.”

Nikki shrugged. “It’s fine. I like the winter, anyways.” Of course, Max knew this. He knew a lot of things about Nikki that he probably didn’t need to know. He knew that her hair was almost half as unruly as Max’s, and that the reason she always had it in pigtails is because it stuck out like a lion’s mane when it was free. He knew that Nikki’s favorite color was red, and that she dreamed of having a pet snake but her mother wouldn’t allow it. He knew that Nikki was a complex person and despite her jock-ish attitude, could sometimes be quite the poet. 

He knew enough about her to be sorry for dragging her an hour away from home in the middle of the night.

_ Needy. _

The echo of the words he’d heard came back, biting at his stomach and making him almost feel sick. He held it in, not wanting to make his friend worry more than she probably already was.

She looked up at the sky, eyes sparkling in the moonlight. “The stars are always so much prettier in Vermont. There’s no light pollution.” She said happily. Max looked up.

He hadn’t noticed it, but the stars stretched across the sky like a forest full of light. An arm of the milky way reached above them, grasping at the Earth like it was just one of the many marbles of this galaxy. Almost as if the tides were not constantly rising and falling somewhere not too far away. Almost as if the world was not spiraling around the people who lived on it.

Almost like it would never change.

“Max?” Nikki asked softly, pulling Max out of his daydream. He turned to look at her, surprised to see her looking at the ground almost sadly. “What happened?”

He didn’t want to tell her. He didn’t want to let her know about the way things were at home, the way it all stuck in his head like tar. He didn’t want her to look at him in the way people do when they find out how sad you really are. So he continued to stay silent.

“I know you really don’t want to tell me,” Nikki started, still sounding gentle. “And you have every reason not to. But I… I really want to help you through this.” 

Max looked at his feet again.

“Just… Tell me where to start?”

 

I have a question for you. I want you to ask yourself, are conditioned behaviours more powerful than what you truly want?

Imagine this. Imagine for years, ever since you were a little kid, you were told to always eat everything on your plate. When you didn’t, you wouldn’t get dinner the next night, left to starve in your room. So the next night, you’d make sure to eat everything on your plate. You’d make sure you’d prove you were a good kid. 

Imagine this. Imagine you leave that household and move to a new one, and suddenly you don’t have to eat everything on your plate. You’re allowed to eat as little or as much food as you want with no punishment, no reason to worry.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Of course you’d let yourself relax. But every day that you had spent locked in your room starving starts to get to you. What if it happens again? What if you finally let your guard down just to end up hungry again the next night?

What a strange conflict. To be torn between want and need.

What a strange conflict indeed.

 

The walls inside Max were crumbling, but that only made him panic. He felt a waterfall of words bubbling the the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t allow himself to let them go. He didn’t want Nikki to think of him the way that he did.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we think our opinions of ourselves are built off the same things others make their opinions on, but they’re not. People tend to define themselves by their most “flawed” features; baby fat, addiction, your weird laugh or the way that your face gets those dimples when you smile. People tend to think the things that make them happy are flawed. People tend to push this on their children, and then their children do the same.

Max still hadn’t answered, and Nikki was beginning to worry. “Max?” She prompted. She reached toward her friend, but he flinched, which only made Nikki more concerned.

“You don’t need to do this.” He said in reply, after what felt like an eternity.

“I know, but I want to help you. I don’t know what happened, but I don’t want you to go through whatever this is alone.” She explained, finding herself rambling out of nervousness. Max stood up from the cement curb he sat on, beginning to feel restless once again. Nikki followed. 

“Just stop! You wouldn’t know how to help.” Max said, turning away and yelling more at the ground than he was to Nikki. “You don’t know anything about me!”

“That’s because you won’t  _ let _ me!” Nikki replied, sadness seeping through her voice. “I try to get you to talk to me but every time you get all nervous and I hate thinking I’m doing that to you. So I stop. But it’s clearly only getting worse for you, and I don’t know what to do at this point! I’m sorry if I cornered you, but…”

Nikki trailed off, taking in a deep breath for a moment, trying to calm down. Max didn’t move, the wind beginning to surround his body.

“I hate seeing you like this. And I want to help. But if that’s not what you want me to do, I’ll stop. I’ll turn around and act like this talk never happened, if that’s what you want me to do.”

Nikki stood completely still, waiting for an answer. Waiting for anything. Max moved slowly, as if he was scared to make a sound as he turned around and faced Nikki, not looking at her as he wrapped his arms around her.

For a moment, the green-haired girl was surprised. But she quickly recovered by hugging Max back, sighing out a breath of tension. Neither of them said anything for a long minute, simply enjoying the warmth that they offered in the cold winter night.

“I’m sorry,” Max started, but he couldn’t finish.

“You have nothing to be sorry for. You could crash at my place tonight, if you don’t want to go back home?” Though Nikki didn’t know the full extent of what things at home were like for Max, she knew he’d much rather stay somewhere else. Anywhere else. That and the futon in Nikki and her mom’s living room was surprisingly comfortable, at least to Max. 

“Yes. Thank you.” His voice was gentle, almost timid as he pulled away. Though the embrace had ended, he still felt the ghost of it through his jacket, on his skin. He almost wished it wouldn’t leave him.

 

The drive felt shorter than it was, Nikki at the wheel of her mother’s silver minivan. Nikki would often make Max drive with her instead of letting him drive his old junker, since the car made her nervous to even be around. “I’ll take you to pick it up in the morning,” She’d said. Max usually argued, but tonight was different.

When they got to the house, both of the teens turning into their beds, asleep before their heads hit the pillow.

 

When the morning light hit Max’s face, he opened his eyes and simply stared at the ceiling. Everything from the night before had vanished without a trace, gone with nothing but the fact he was at Nikki’s house, on her futon and waking up with his shoes still on.

He just thought as he laid there in the warm grey light. Clouds brewed high above the apartment he found himself in, and electricity stirred in the cold air outside.

But Max was not out there, where lightning rumbled in the distance. He was inside this house that had become so familiar to him through sleepovers and crashing after parties and studying together with his best friend. Maybe even something a bit closer, but who was he to say?

At second thought, he didn’t think that was possible, to be closer than what they already were. Not for him, at the very least.

“Oh, hi, Max.” A sleepy voice called to him. He turned to look, seeing Nikki’s mom standing sleepy in the hallway between the kitchen and living room. “You ready for breakfast?”

The woman was tall, and lines had grown deeper in her face since Max first met her. Green hair hadn’t yet been put in it’s normal braid, and probably wouldn’t be until noon when she’d go to work at a diner that’d been around since the 50’s. She’d grown so used to seeing Max unexpectedly that she no longer even needed to ask.

“Yeah. Thanks, Candy.” Max said, sitting up. He had barely finished stretching when he heard a loud cheer from the other room before Nikki came barreling out of her room, darting for the kitchen. 

“I call making pancake batter!” She yelled out happily, sliding on her socks. With a clatter of noise, Max didn’t even need to look to know she had slipped into the table. The boy laughed to himself quietly and stood up.

Max looked out the window at the grey clouds once again, thinking of last night. None of it made sense now, but the more he thought about it, the less he really thought it mattered.

“Come on! Help us make breakfast!” Nikki called, and Max smiled.

“We should go bother Neil after this, make him come to pick up my car with us.” Max said as he walked into the warm kitchen.

Nikki laughed and agreed. With that, Max felt the weight of last night leave him. Neither him nor his friend knew what last night should mean.

But isn’t that the same reason we love the night sky?


End file.
